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by Bruce Maulden

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Rockets, Scum and Nudes

July 18, 2014

Overcast and a bit of ground fog this way-too-early Friday on California’s north coast as we look the weekend square in the eyes — and Saturday blinked. The air’s somewhat cooler this morning, too, so maybe we’re catching some of that polar vortex shit.

Meanwhile, out in the world, real shit is hitting the fan. Another Malaysia Airlines jet made the news — this one isn’t missing, but apparently crashed, but in the words of Joe Biden, “not an accident, blown out of the sky” over Ukraine, killing all 295 people on board. This incident will most-definitely make the Russia/Ukraine thingy even more shitty.

And, to the east of that mess, Israel actually has started a ground war, moving tanks and troops into Gaza, and continuing an endless war in a small space. This everlasting conflict just stays ugly:

A CNN journalist on the Israel-Gaza border created controversy Thursday when she tweeted that Israelis who could be heard cheering while a presumed rocket was landing in Gaza were “scum.” After a report on Israelis troops moving into Gaza, CNN international correspondent Diana Magnay tweeted, “Israelis on the hill above Sderot as bombs land on Gaza; threatened to ‘destroy our car if I said wrong word’. Scum” The tweet was deleted a short time later, but people were already attacking Magnay for the comment. During her report, Magnay described the scene from the border. “It is an astonishing, macabre and awful thing to watch this display of fire in the air.”

The gap between Israel and Palestine is so wide and so deep, there will never, ever be any lasting peace there. A nightmare recurring over and over again with no hope for any relief. The stories the next few days from that hot spot will be terrible.

In that Ukraine/airliner shoot-down, from reports it was indicated most-likely the missile that hit the Malaysia Airlines jet was tracked by American equipment: The U.S. operates fleets of listening satellites and early warning satellites that could have identified the location of a missile launch site and its trajectory as it shot up to the 33,000-foot cruising altitude of the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777. And maybe he NSA?

Which brings up more stained shit from the Eddie Snowden files, this one making the notorious rounds. NSA folks pass around nude photos says Snowden in a video interview at the Guardian, released Thursday. The big score comes from this:

“You’ve got young enlisted guys, 18 to 22 years old,” Snowden said. “They’ve suddenly been thrust into a position of extraordinary responsibility where they now have access to all of your private records. In the course of their daily work they stumble across something that is completely unrelated to their work in any sort of necessary sense. For example, an intimate nude photo of someone in a sexually compromising position. But they’re extremely attractive. “So what do they do? They turn around in their chair and show their co-worker. The co-worker says: ‘Hey that’s great. Send that to Bill down the way.’ And then Bill sends it to George and George sends it to Tom. And sooner or later this person’s whole life has been seen by all of these other people. It’s never reported. Nobody ever knows about it because the auditing of these systems is incredibly weak. The fact that your private images, records of your private lives, records of your intimate moments have been taken from your private communications stream from the intended recipient and given to the government without any specific authorization without any specific need is itself a violation of your rights. Why is that in a government database?” Then Alan Rusbridger, The Guardian’s editor-in-chief, asked: “You saw instances of that happening?” “Yeah,” Snowden responded. “Numerous?” “It’s routine enough, depending on the company that you keep, it could be more or less frequent. These are seen as the fringe benefits of surveillance positions.”

The interview is pretty neat — Snowden is a fairly-neat guy and has some funny moments — he even believes we are not living a version of ‘1984.’